This is officially an award-winning blog

HNN, Best group blog: "Witty and insightful, the Edge of the American West puts the group in group blog, with frequent contributions from an irreverent band.... Always entertaining, often enlightening, the blog features snazzy visuals—graphs, photos, videos—and zippy writing...."

Okay, Douthat is being condescending here, but I don’t think he was particularly disrespectful of Hitchens’ convictions. Douthat isn’t saying that Hitchens would have agreed about God; just that Hitchens was wrong, and that deep down Hitchens must have intuited his error. He could have said something similar to or about Hitchens while Hitchens was alive.

I had a similar conversation once with a good friend that went something like this:

Friend: “I know, deep down, that you believe in God.”
Me: “That’s a terribly condescending thing to say – implying that I don’t know my own mind. Besides, I’ve always been pretty sure that you are aware, deep down, that God doesn’t exist.”

Douthat is right that among the New Atheists, Hitchens was the most amenable friendly banter of this sort, though Douthat is (by my reckoning) incorrect that Hitchens now appreciates his error.

I married into some Lutherans and have attended to their theology, which I think is consistent with that of Augustine and Paul. Belief in God is entirely the gift of God himself, unearned by the believer.

So on that old-school theory, it makes no sense to argue that Hitchens or any other atheist “really” believed in God. Disbelief is the normal, fallen condition, and no believing Christian has any right to condemn an atheist, given that the Christian is powerless to explain why he is not himself an atheist.

(Sure, Douthat is Catholic so probably has a complex workaround for why the foregoing is not R.C. dogma. Paul was not by any means a consistent theologian.)

booferama has it right; we’ve seen far too much booze-soaked hagiography. Still, I can hardly begrudge my namesake this posthumous recognition; where there is so much smoke there surely was considerable fire. As for Douhat, this was a clear case of wishful thinking, not at all malicious or duplicious. He’s done much worse.

Given his belief in Hell and its role in providing humanity with meaning (see Delong for refs), Douthat is actually pointing out that Hitchens is at this moment experiencing eternal torment, and aware of why he is there. Which is more honest than most Christians usually are about what they think will happen to us atheists, but hardly respectful.